My Experience from Building My Own SaaS

Hello everyone! It’s been a while since the last newsletter, but I have a good one for you today.

I have been rethinking the branding on this newsletter and to be honest, DevOps seems almost a bit too niche. While the content will remain focused on the things that I have been working on and helping clients with, I want to keep topics broad enough to appeal to a larger audience.

That being said, I do still love automation. 😛 

Today, let’s discuss a few learnings that I have after launching my first SaaS product.

Building živno

I built živno because I wanted to solve a problem that I had. I hated the invoices solutions that were available in Czech Republic, which is where I currently reside.

Initially, I tried utilizing an application that I used in the United States. This had a few issues.

I needed to add a currency conversion on each invoice from the invoice currency to CZK. This took about 2-3 minutes on every invoice that was sent and needed to be tediously looked after to ensure dates were accurate.

I needed to add specific verbiage for VAT Reverse Charge Mechanisms. This meant that I needed to add it on each invoice manually. This doesn’t take too long, but still something to remember.

The invoicing app I used in the US had so many features, but I only really used a very small subset. I did need to pay for some specific features like invoicing in different currencies.

These are not major problems, but they were annoying enough for me to build my own project.

Lesson 1. What sounds easy may actually be hard and sometimes what you think is hard is actually easy

I should have known this from being in the software industry already. However, I was gung ho on the project and thought I could easily get things done quickly. The first difficult task was rendering a pdf.

I had never rendered a pdf before. In prinicipal, it’s not that difficult. However, when you are dealing with dynamic data with varying column & row sizes, the process becomes tricky. I ended up spending multiple weekends working out the pdf generation.

On the flip side, I originally thought payment integration would be tough. However, I was able to integrate Stripe’s payment links and customer portal in a matter of a few hours. It was almost trivial to do and I had never done it before. I was pleasantly surprised and haven’t had any issue with the platform.

Lesson 2. GDPR sucks

As an American, I was pretty obliviously to GDPR regulations. When building apps in the US, it’s not such a big deal to store data about people in your application. However, in Europe, GDPR makes this much different.

First of all, you can only collect data that is actually used in the app itself. Any additional data that is not pertinent to the app is considered to be unlawfully collected. Which means that for forms in the app, everything must have a well-defined purpose to be collected.

Second, you need to provide a way for user’s to be forgotten. This can be pretty simple, such as providing an email address for users to request their data be deleted. I have a script that I created that simply removes all their data from the database without much thought.

You do need to make this clear in your privacy policy & terms & conditions. I used Termify to generate my privacy policy & terms & conditions that includes this information with an email address of your choice. It is inexpensive and provides all of the legal documents you’d need to start a SaaS quickly and easily.

There’s a ton of other GDPR things that had to be covered, but I want to keep this section brief. You can find out so much more about GDPR regulations on the GDPR site. If you’re just starting to get into the tech space, I would recommend becoming familiar with GDPR, as it applies to any international business working in the EU. It’s also not a bad space for consulting in! 😉 

Lesson 3. Creating fintech apps comes with a unique set of challenges

You are dealing with people’s money when you build a fintech product. Obviously, people like their money and things need to be perfect. There’s really no room for error. This means that tests need to be written.

That’s not a bad thing in it of itself. I like writing tests and find that having tests provides a wonderful calmness when making changes later on. However, when you’re building something new, writing tests can be a chore and adds a ton of extra time to development.

Not only does the perfection matter, but you also need to take into account what data is stored for account numbers and such. Thankfully, Czechia has an open banking system. This means that bank account numbers are not private information. However, I wanted and needed the app to be able to take in US-based account numbers for myself. This meant that I needed to comply with regulations.

Lesson 4. Validate, validate, validate

Going from 0 to 1 is always tough. Even when the technology already exists and you want to build something with it, it can be daunting and takes so much of your time. However, if I had spent more time learning from potential customers first, I could have nearly halved my time to market. I spent egregious amounts of time working on features that are hardly used.

It’s also not enough for just you wanting to use the product. Other people need to want to use it as well. Don’t spend your time building when you should be validating. It’s critical for your success. Otherwise, you’ll launch to only a handful of potential customers that may not even continue to use your product.

Lesson 5. Marketing is so much more important than the technology

Marketing is hard as a developer. Telling a story is quite difficult, even when served on a platter. You need to constantly be telling people about your product, even when you don’t want to.

This was a skill that I did not have, but as time goes on, I have become more comfortable telling people about the app and self-promoting. I’ve also learned how to run ads on platforms I’d never had before. I have previously done ads on X & Facebook, but experimented a little bit with LinkedIn this time around.

All of these topics could be an entire newsletter in themselves. I wanted to give a brief overview of what I learned. I may do a deeper dive into each in the future and potentially more as time goes on.

If you are interested in trying the app (must be in Czechia to use it), you can find it here: zivno.cz! If you have any questions about any of these topics, let me know as I’d be happy to speak more to each of these in the future.

As always, if you liked the content, share it with a friend who is thinking of building a SaaS or in the process of building something new. If you have any ideas for content you’d like to hear more about, feel free to reply to this email as it gets sent to my inbox.

Have a great weekend!